Robin Walker Recordings

Robin Walker was born in York in 1953 and attended schools attached to York Minster – where he was Head Chorister – for ten years. It was here that the benign genius of the then organist, Dr Francis Jackson (born 1917), began its lifelong influence upon him.

He studied at Durham University with the Australian composer David Lumsdaine, and at the Royal College of Music with the late Anthony Milner. He taught successively at the universities of London and Manchester before resigning his post and moving to the Pennine hills of northern England. For the last thirty years he has lived on or next to a farm in the West Riding of Yorkshire, taking part daily in the physical realities of farm life, gathering firewood, clearing drainage channels in wet weather, repairing fence-posts and wiring, digging vegetable patches in the allotment garden. And so on.

Though a serious student of modernism until the mid-1980s, he withdrew from its secular mythology – and the intellectual fabrications built upon it – in order to investigate the instinctual basis of musical composition, and the archetypal shapes that arise naturally therefrom. This process has involved a long and continuing apprenticeship to Nature, and an extensive exploration of differentiated feeling, the musical results of which have formed a preoccupation with symphonic music and with spontaneous ‘folk’ utterance. These elements have most recently been brought together in his full-length opera Odysseus on Ogygia.

His work has benefited spiritually and technically from two periods of time in India – investigating the dance rituals of Bharata Natyam in the south, and the music of monastic Buddhism in the far north. As a classic agnostic he does not deny the existence of a God or gods, but is unable to know anything about them. He is an interpreter of dreams and unconscious impulses, and – as the true voice of the spirit – lives according to their instruction.